The ABCs of Providing CI Through Remote Instruction: Z is for ZoomIt

Yay, I’ve made it to the end of this A-Z series!

When I started this series last year, I never thought that so many educators would still be conducting instruction remotely over a year after they started. But here we are, and many of us have spent the last year teaching in some sort of remote or hybrid model. We have become very adept at navigating much of the technology that seemed so new and exciting to us a year ago when I started blogging about it in this series.

When I got the idea to begin this series, I was sure that this, my last installment, would be about using Zoom, the meeting software that allows people to hold meetings remotely. But that was a year ago when hardly anyone had heard of it or used it that much. But now it’s a year later, and I think much has been written and said about how to use Zoom and similar applications like Microsoft Teams or Google Meet and all their features in an education setting. We’re tired of virtual classes, saying “You’re muted,” and teaching to black screens. We’re so over Zoom. So instead, I’ve decided to use this post to talk about another application called ZoomIt.

ZoomIt is a downloadable tool that allows users to annotate on and zoom in and out on their computer screens. It is a piece of software that users can download. Once it’s installed, it stays dormant until the user activates it . Once activated, users can customize keyboard shortcuts to operate it. It also plays very nicely with other software on computers, including virtual meeting technology like Zoom or Google Meet.

I heard about ZoomIt from Brett Chonko, how maintains a YouTube channel called Comprehensible RVA. You can click on the picture below to access his video demonstrating this software.

I have been using Zoom for over a year now and I know that Zoom has a feature that allows users to annotate directly on the screen. My school district disabled that feature, however, to prevent mischievous youngsters from being able to use it, so I found this tool to be handy as a workaround to that. And I am not familiar enough with other virtual meeting software to know if the ability to annotate is available, so if not, teachers may want to explore using this software if they are interested in annotating anything on their computer.

Thanks to everyone who kept up with my A-Z series. I hope you found something useful in these posts and that you will stick around for future, non-pandemic teaching thoughts on this blog!